SECTION 2
Chapter 1:
The Empty Scoreboard
4 minute read
In CorporateBall, everyone has a position.
Every organization runs like a sports franchise, whether anyone says so out loud or not. The people at the top are the front office: making roster decisions, setting strategy, controlling the budget. Managers are coaches: building their teams, developing their players, managing the game-to-game. And employees are players: professionals with skills, producing results game after game.
And scores matter. No franchise plays without them: revenue, margin, retention, quality. The numbers fill dashboards and drive every decision the front office makes. But here the resemblance to sport breaks down. In sports, a shortstop knows his fielding percentage. A striker knows his goals, his assists, his minutes. Every player in every game knows their own statistics and how they connect to the score.
But in most CorporateBall franchises—or companies—the scoreboard is kept far above the players. Employees can’t determine how much they influence it. The line from what they produce to the numbers that decide budgets, promotions, and headcount is never drawn. And they have no well-defined statistics of their own, no continual feedback on the value they bring to the company. The game is being scored. But neither the employee nor their manager has clarity on an employee’s true value. And that means the head office doesn’t know either.
CorporateBall: The league most professionals play, where organizations are franchises, employees are players, leaders are coaches, and consultants are scouts or agents. Unlike real sports, most of those involved in CorporateBall never see the score.
***
Reid Montague had been in his manager role for six years now. He thought he knew how to read the scoreboard. More accurately, he didn’t think he knew how to read it; he didn’t think about it at all, but just assumed he knew all he needed to.
Then an email arrived on a Tuesday.
Subject: Headcount Review—Response Required by EOD, Two Weeks from Friday.
Please provide a written justification for each current headcount on your team. Justifications should address the measurable value each role contributes to organizational priorities.
Attached to the email was a calendar hold: a review with Sandra Gilder's office, set for the Friday the justification was due. The document wasn't the whole ask. Someone was going to sit across from him and ask about it.
Measurable value. Measurable value?
Reid set down his tea and looked at the whiteboard across his office—sprint timelines, a color-coded org chart with one person out of date, sticky notes he kept meaning to throw away. The visual evidence of a team in motion.
He picked up a marker. Held it over the whiteboard for a long moment.
In sports, a scoreboard doesn’t show effort. It doesn’t show motion. It shows one thing: the measurable result of everything that has happened on the field.
Reid looked at his whiteboard again, more carefully this time.
What if he hadn’t been reading a scoreboard at all?
He recapped the marker. Set it down.
The team was good. He believed that without reservation. They took a client from signed contract to a working product—responsible until that client hit 65% utilization within nine months, and remained on call in case the number ever slipped.
There was Ingrid Solberg, who built the implementation plan for every new client and somehow made the logistics behind it look effortless. And Devon Ashby, with client calls that never seemed to rattle him and status meetings people actually looked forward to. Tomás Rivera, who trained and supported every customer through implementation and knew the product better than anyone. Amara Osei, who turned every past implementation’s mistakes into a lesson nobody had to relearn. And Dani Chen, who had been quietly exceptional in a way Reid could feel but had never put into words precise enough to defend in a room—or apparently in a headcount justification.
He opened a blank document and typed her name at the top.
Dani is a high performer who consistently delivers results.
He read it back. Deleted it.
He tried again. Deleted that too.
Five people. A little over two weeks to explain why all five of them were worth what the company was paying.
He sent a message to Ray Cortez, a senior manager elsewhere in the company who had been a mentor to Reid for at least four years—someone who had seen enough of the organization to know where the bodies were buried and which questions actually mattered.
Ray—do you have thirty minutes this week? I’m working on headcount justification and I think I’ve been approaching this wrong.
He hit send. Sat back.
He had built a team. He believed in that team. But he had just discovered that belief, on its own, was not a business case.
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